I love notebooks and pens! I really love using cloth-bound, 40-sheet B5 notebooks for classes. I can fill them up in a semester, and having the cloth binding means extra incentive to make every class so I don' t have missing pages or out of order notes

I also keep a dotted Rhodia webbie journal, and my pride and joy is a Pilot Vanishing Point with raden that looks like the night sky. It was a birthday present from my parents.

JetPens is so hard to resist, but there's also TokyoPenShop.com which offers a few larger sizes, like .7 and 1.0. I love the Pilot Juice pens for every day stuff at work. They're really cheap, last forever, and have gorgeous, bright, pigmented colors. And my other current favorite is the Signo RT1 UMN-155. Thin black lines that are super smooth.

I have a weakness for shiny/glittery/sparkly coloured pens and binder clips. Kind of like a magpie. I take minutes for a group; one of the members has a sparkly bright green pen and he gestures with it when he talks. I have a hard time concentrating...one of these days he's going to put it down and walk away and HA HA! IT WILL BE MINE!

A lady in my department is responsible for ordering promotional items to give away at faires and other events. She ordered thousands of pens with our university logo on them -- simple and boring enough -- but she didn't realize that she'd ordered pens that are about 2x's the normal size for a ballpoint pen. The barrel is about an inch across at the widest point and it's about 7.25 inches long. They're GIANT pens, and I love them. oooooo big pens. She was so upset when she first received them but she orders them on purpose now. Promotional items are usually notorious cheaply made and break easily but these are surprisingly smooth and comfortable. I think they're a hit at faires too, but I only care about having my own stash of big giant pens.

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"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools." — Douglas Adams

I empathize with both of you! When I see awesome pens or notebooks I feel like this primal part of my lizard brain is starting to take control and perhaps override my common sense and politeness. I am not alone in this, although compared to the people I see at my work conferences every year, I think I do a much better job controlling myself! I at least stand there and talk to the vendors about their products first, and then ask if I can have one of these and one of those if they don't offer, and I say thank you. Basic kindergarten manners.

I remember once I was talking to a vendor and this other person came along and swept all the goodies on the vendor's little table into their bag, and walked off--candy, pens, highlighters, post-it notes. It was so fast there wasn't even time to say anything. Obviously they had a lot of experience at this! The vendor and I just stared at them, then at each other. Okay, so the vendor had more boxes of stuff under the table, but honestly! You'd think people needed to supply their whole office, or feed their entire household, from just the free stuff they scavenged at conferences.

In other news, I went to Barnes & Noble last night. I knew it would be dangerous going in. I was prepared to face the Piccadilly notebooks with the prints on them, as I already own several, but I forgot about their Moleskine-esque notebooks. So... four of them came home with me. I got an "essential" notebook in large, which was roughly 8.5"x11" (probably a bit smaller) with a flexible cover; an "essential" medium notebook, which had a hardcover and was maybe 5"x7"; a faux-leather notebook about the same size (only a dollar more for the fake leather!); and a three-pack of softcover notebooks, maybe 4"x6" in red, tan, and black. The first three notebooks I got were the light teal color. They only had that and black--if they'd had more colors I probably would've bought them, too.

B&N has so many notebooks! They also sell actual Moleskine, quite a variety of them; plus they had a Paris and London-themed display of items that included some Cavallini notebooks. And they had little four-packs of notebooks by Jonathan Adler--just small enough that I could force myself to put them back down. And they were kind of paisley too, I really dislike paisley. Plus all their really nice notebooks for $15 and up, which my store artfully arranges by color family.

LazyDaisy's story about the fat office pens remind me of a story that can also go into the SS and Moocher threads. When I started in a brand new created department, the downtown office sent us fat comfortable pen and pencil sets with the department logo. There were only enough for each member of the department to get one set, and they were highly coveted. We left them on top of our desks because our room was locked at night. Well, one weekend there was a meeting of the higher ups in that room. On Monday, all our pens were gone . Maybe they weren't stolen on purpose, but who goes to a meeting without pen and paper? And all of them were taken (about 7). Those pens were so awesome and I still miss mine.

rose red, that is a terrible story! It is really poor form for the higher-up to mooch office supplies from their underlings. Spend a little money and get your own!

Reporting back on the Tul fine-point gel pens I bought the other day. I have almost used up the purple one. Overall, it's okay, nothing to complain about really, but I probably wouldn't bother buying them again. The point is very fine; it doesn't bleed/show through the paper, even though I'm just using a Mead 5 Star composition book; it doesn't write quite as smoothly as, say, a Pilot G2. I like that I can take the pen apart and see how much ink is left. I always seem to do that first thing with pens! My mom says I would always undress baby dolls right away, too... I guess I want to see what I'm getting!

I passed the halfway point in the composition book last night, BTW. Always an accomplishment!

Also, in the tiny Office/School Supply section at Meijer, I found Leuchtturm1917 notebooks in two different sizes and four different colors, on clearance. The larger ones were 11.49--I see them online for more like $15+.

Finished off the purple Tul 0.5mm gel pen. It was, as I mentioned, alright and I'll use the other three I got, but I probably won't buy it again. It did one more annoying thing: towards the end it started to get subtly fainter/thinner, yet kept writing for many pages--I could look at my most recent page and flip back ten to see that the ink was notably darker earlier. That really irritates me. I want a pen that will write consistently and then just die--at most the fade-out should only be a few lines. Of course I hang on to pens until I've used every molecule of ink in the barrel--a less obsessive person could probably chuck them as soon as they started to suspect it was running out!

Now I'm using a pen I got from JetPens. It's a Yasutomo Y&C Gel Stylist pen, 0.5mm, in violet. Very fine tip, slightly more pinkish color compared to the Tul purple, and bit wetter. Still works fine on the plain ol' Mead Five Star paper, though you can see it through the paper a slight bit more. So far I like it better because it writes more smoothly. I like to hold the pen close to the tip, though, and on this pen there's these hard plastic ridges right above the tip--the official finger grip starts beyond that. So I don't know how it will do for long-term use. I'm kind of laughing at myself because I was all excited about using this gel pen from JetPens, from Japan I guess, like it would be some kind of revolutionary writing tool, and it's... a purple gel ink pen. Perfectly fine so far, no shifting of the heavens, though. Well, when I get home tonight I'll see if it's written a novel for me while I've been at work today, LOL!